Quote of the Day: Andy Grove

Former Intel CEO Andry Grove recently wrote an interesting piece on energy. His angle is not totally green, but it's worth reading. Here's a good quote:

"New technology often shows up in this manner: it is not completely satisfactory in the beginning, but good enough to get going. The first personal computers, for example, were little more than toys. They fascinated cognoscenti and hobbyists, but compared to the mainframe computers that were the workhorses of that time, they were limited. PCs quickly grew in capability and eventually reached parity with mainframes and then surpassed them in efficiency and computing power. Such approaches, of starting low and moving up, have been named 'disruptive technologies.'

The automobile industry, in the main, has not embraced disruptive technology. It has been waiting instead for batteries to improve until they can allow electric cars to enter the marketplace with the same driving range as gasoline-fueled cars. Battery developers, in turn, have been waiting for demand from the automobile industry to develop before fully committing the resources required to do the job. The generation and transmission infrastructures have not been built up to service the potentially explosive demand from transportation. The wait has gone on for some time.""To be sure, this situation is starting to change. Startups like Tesla Motors and Project Better Place have begun to experiment with all-electric cars, and important developments are underway at Nissan and General Motors. But our exposure to the vagaries of oil supply is growing by the month.